The waves crashing on the seashore distract my dad while I lift the oversized queen and heft it across the ten-foot chess board. With a heaping cone of mango ice cream in hand, he is about to waltz right into my bold and calculated trap. I take more than just the state of the chess game into account when I make the risky move; my timing must be perfect. In this particular game, there’s more at stake than a win or loss, so my strategy should transcend the traditional rules of chess. I decide to make the move while he gazes off towards the ocean, absorbed in his ice-cream and the general joy of beachgoing. Some might call that unsportsmanlike, but I’m of the opinion that chess is a strategy game, not a sport.

There are many kinds of board games, but strategy is my favorite genre. At the chess board, strategy is usually governed by precision, careful thinking, rule adherence, tournaments, and men; I learned that lesson young. 

I am in kindergarten. Still, I’m at my first middle school chess tournament. The boy across from me at the cafeteria table is twice my height. His dad leans over his shoulder. Mine waits on the other side of the room. 

“Watch out for her queen,” the boy’s helicopter dad remarks.

That’s cheating! You can’t get help from your dad, I thought. But the unspoken rules of the middle school chess tournament governed that in a match against a kindergarten girl, a fifth grade boy could get as much help from his dad as he wanted. 

After that first tournament, a gamble began.

“If you can win one game against me, I’ll buy you ice cream every day for a week,” my dad promised, hoping the bet would cheer me up and keep me interested in chess after that sour match in the cafeteria. While my dad’s encouragement and love were enough to keep me from swearing off the game entirely, I stopped going to the chess club after kindergarten. My strong internal sense of justice has always allowed me to enjoy the concept of strategy games, but I never had a chance at tolerating the stale patriarchy of the competitive chess scene. 

Chess isn't the only strategy game in which each piece in the game is governed by its own rules, immutable as the laws that govern the physical world. In middle school, I was introduced to the wide world of indie board games. One of my swim team friends invited me to his house to play a role-playing game and then indulge in board games afterwards. Over the next few years, I would learn to love games like Modern Art, the art auction board game; I’m The Boss, a fast-paced negotiation game; Heroes of the Multiverse, a deck building game based on a retro comic book aesthetic; and The Resistance, the social deduction game. This wasn’t family living room Monopoly, nor classroom Chutes and Ladders; the corporate gods of Hasbro had little influence on the basement indie board game scene.

Amid the pink-beanied backdrop of 2017, the board game Illimat was created by game designer Keith Baker and (my favorite) Portland band The Decemberists. I snatched my copy as soon as it was published. I was lured in by the game’s five-suit deck, tarot-like Luminaries, simple cloth board, mysterious lore, and slew of references to the band’s music. Illimat lies solidly in the strategy game genre, with a strong flavor of what the developers call the “modern classic” vibe. 

Sure, Illimat has a book of rules. They’re complicated and technical, just like chess. But playing Illimat for me isn’t about winning—it’s about telling a story at the table. I love teaching new people how to play Illimat; I get to see how different minds work through and interpret the rules of the game. 

The best moment in a game of Illimat is when someone triggers a Harmonic Convergence. When all four Luminaries on the board are revealed, all the players stand up and switch seats at the table, leaving everything (including their hands and point tallies) behind. It doesn’t happen in every game; in fact, it’s rare. So when it happens, everyone gets excited and feels lucky to witness it… even if it means they lost the lead. Everyone at the table is surprised; it’s like witnessing a supernatural event.

At the end of a game of Illimat, everyone tallies their scores. In a close game, it can be a moment of tension; usually, that’s not the case. Even then, the end of the game is usually underwhelming. Someone wins, everyone else technically loses, but the most important question is…

“Can we play again?”

Strangers to the scene of strategy gaming may see our thick rulebooks, gaming conventions, and occasional heated arguments as a sign of the lingering hold chess and its “community” have on our idea of what strategy means. However, due to its mechanics and its quirky, witchy aesthetic, playing Illimat with friends or total strangers is less a calculated competition, and more a friendly (yet tricky and thoughtful) experience. As a kid in the chess club, I believed all strategy games require strict precision and adherence to standards, but Illimat solidly breaks that mold. At my game table, the construct we call “strategy” is really about finding ways to sidestep the natural order and find creative ways to flourish under a system. 

More than six years of gaming have taught me that strategy has a whole buffet of flavors. This new understanding of what it means to strategize applies to more than just pickup Illimat, family game nights, board game cafe brunches, and weekend basement gaming meet-ups. Games have guidelines, moving pieces, and competition… just like life. For a structure-minded person such as myself, moving through the world with any ounce of fulfillment requires an understanding of how systems work. Board games helped me realize that there is always another way to achieve goals, and always a better, more enjoyable way of living. All it takes is a wonderful sense of play, an openness to doing things differently, and a hint of mischief…

“Checkmate!”

With the mindset that every action I take (both in games and in life) can be strategic, I won that giant game on the beach, thirteen years after my dad wagered that I would never beat him in chess.